Maculae
by CiderApples
Summary: P/O written for op ficathon on LJ.  Was written as a future-fic, but is now AU. Prompt: Peter and Olivia out for drinks.


_December, 2008, 12:47am_

A month ago, she would have been more surprised to get a phone call at one in the morning.

Now, not so.

Now instead of John and sex and happiness there were mental hospitals and petrified buses and people pissing themselves 'just a squirt' in her car.

Olivia looked at the little lit-up name on her phone and groused, "This is not my job," except that now it kind of was. At least, that was the impression she'd been getting from the people in nicer suits than she wore.

She hit _send_ and said, "Dunham," at the same time Peter did.

"We can't both be Dunham," he said. "You take today and I'll take tomorrow."

"What happened?" she said tersely.

"What _happened?_" Peter said, affronted in a way that suggested she was right to be wary. "Nothing _happened._ Don't worry; I tucked Walter in a while ago. I'm really getting the hang of Row, Row, Row Your Boat." He sounded happy, or self-satisfied. It would have been a welcome change from his usual caustic bitterness if he didn't seem like the kind of person who wore happiness like a wolf wore sheepskin.

"Okay, then," she said. "What _is _this about?"

"I've been thinking," Peter said, "that since it looks like we might be working together for a while, I'd extend the olive branch of alcohol."

Olivia fell silent. It sounded...friendly. She had the distinct feeling he was setting up a con.

"I'm inviting you out for drinks," he said into the silence, "in case that wasn't clear."

"It's one in the morning."

"You're awake."

"Maybe because you woke me," she said.

"I think we both know I didn't."

"Goodnight, Peter," she said, but she kept the phone to her ear.

"Okay, wait," he followed quickly. "Look, I didn't even want to bring this up, but it's my birthday, and I think that since you've done a great job cutting me off from every part of my old life, you owe it to me to fill out my birthday party."

Olivia actually pulled the phone away from her face a little, which masked her huff of indignation. "It's not your birthday," she said.

There was a pause on Peter's end, then a slow, creeping smile that she wasn't sure how she sensed.

"You memorized my file."

"No," she said immediately.

"You _did,_" he said. Goddammit, he sounded delighted.

"I'm just good with dates. Any numbers," she said.

"Sure. Fine. Well, I'm already downtown," he said, and she could hear the shape of his breath and the sound of wind, like he was looking up and around, "so maybe you could help me out. I'm walking...I'm not sure where to find a decent indecent place around here."

And despite her resentment and suspicion, Olivia wanted to help. She always wanted to help. Sometimes she wanted to help so much that she didn't see the illogic of a man who made a living knowing cities inside and out asking for directions to a bar in Boston.

So she sighed: "Where are you?"

She thought that her acquiescence might buy her out of his manipulations, but he immediately named what might have been the worst streetcorner in Boston and she knew she was going to intervene and she knew that it was exactly what he'd intended. She hung her head in frustration but told him to head for the nearest dive she knew.

"See you there," Peter said, and hung up.

Olivia sat on her bed with her phone still in her hand. She stared into the semi-dark of her room and felt a hot, confused sort of rage. Because she _was_ going to see him there. And she could tell herself that it was because part of her job was making sure Peter Bishop stayed securely within the grasp of the FBI, or she could tell herself it was because it had been a while since she'd talked to someone smarter than she was, or she could admit that she could use a drink or two, but for whatever reason she was putting her shoes on and grabbing her coat and keys and then she was out the door.

_December, 2008, 1:22am_

It was a dive. There was nothing not-divey about it. Metal door, grated window. Hours of operation written in Sharpie on the paint, Thursday and Friday closing times conspicuously chipped away. Olivia could hear the jukebox from the parking lot, but couldn't tell the song until she yanked the door open.

_Ah. Whitesnake. _

The bar was a shrine to patina. Strings of filmy Christmas lights crawled around the cornice with half-bare plastic garlands. A battered poster for Ho-Ho-Hoegaarden was tacked halfheartedly next to a foil shamrock that was faded to half-yellow. A Boston Herald swag clock on the wall was missing a second hand and running a solid half-hour slow. The big money had gone for calendars of swimsuit models and posters of the Red Sox.

Peter was sitting at the bar, mother-henning several empty shot glasses.

"They don't regenerate on their own," Olivia said, sidling up next to him and nudging one of the glasses.

"Don't they?" he asked. He turned his head a scant degree toward her, letting his eyes do the rest of the tracking. She slid onto the stool next to his.

"Is that all from the last twenty minutes?" she asked, pointing to his collection of empties.

He didn't answer, just started lining up the glasses on the bar. She couldn't tell if he was drunk. She was pretty sure he _would _be drunk if he'd had five shots since he'd called her, so if he _weren't_ drunk it meant he'd already been in this bar when he'd called her, which meant she'd been roundly played though she wasn't sure to what end.

"Peter," she said, but before she could get any further he was waving the bartender over.

"One for the lady," he said, "same as me."

"Let her choose," the bartender said. Something about the way the situation was unfolding made Olivia want to flatly refuse, but he already had Bushmills in one hand and Jameson's in the other. So she just pointed.

"Protestants," he muttered.

"Don't forget to card this one," Peter said, and Olivia looked at him funny because he was slurring some words and not others. "She's a _cop._"

The bartender paused with the bottle in hand. Olivia smiled as disarmingly as possible.

"Not just a cop," Peter continued, "she's _FBI._ Go ahead, check."

The bartender rolled a plug of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other. "Let's go, then," he said tiredly.

Peter arched an eyebrow at her with a game smile and for some reason it made her feel as if flipping her shield in a place like this might actually be a little fun. So she did; she took it out and flipped the top back and put it out there. The bartender frowned but said nothing, just poured the shot and wandered away down the bar. He leaned into a corner of men, maybe regulars, and whispered something that made them look at her in a way that made her slightly uncomfortable.

She looked back at Peter, who had lost his smile and now just looked tired.

"What was that all about?" she asked him. He looked at her and shrugged, as if it were odd that she thought it was odd to be outed as FBI in a shitty little hole in the middle of the night. She leaned her elbows on the bar. A drop of whiskey trailed down the shot glass to merge with other stains. Aside from the general off-feeling of the situation, nothing seemed to be _happening._ She wasn't sure what she'd expected from Peter Bishop, but it was something more exciting than this weary strangeness: drunk and not-drunk, interested and then distant. Why had he asked her to come?

"All right. Let's go," she said finally.

"You didn't finish your drink."

"You go ahead and have it." She pushed the shot toward him. "For your birthday."

"It's not my birthday." He wasn't looking at her. He was looking into the mirror behind the bottles and mess. He was making no motion to go.

"Well if you don't want a ride, I'll see you tomorrow," Olivia said. She stood up and straightened her coat. Peter made no actual effort to stop her but he looked like he might, if he could think of a way before she was gone. She started for the door but then stopped and circled back. She didn't know _why_ she was circling back, and even as she did it she knew it was a stupid thing to do because there was no good reason she could give him except that he felt - this _all_ felt - too still, like a pot about to boil or a storm about to break.

"And I'm taking your keys," she said. Even to her it sounded contrived. Peter looked up at her with a lazy, wily smile.

"What keys?" he drawled.

"I'm serious," she said.

"Yeah, me too," he said. He touched the tips of his fingers together like wires and made a electrical _zzzt_ noise. "You didn't think Walter could hold on to a set of _keys_ for the last eighteen years, did you? I think we're all surprised enough that he remembered where the _car _was."

This distracted Olivia. "How do you unlock it?" she asked.

"I don't _lock_ it."

"Wait," she said. "So right now, Walter's car is sitting out in that lot, unlocked, with the ignition wires hanging out, and you really think it'll still be there when you're sober enough to walk out of here?" She felt transparent, arguing about that worthless jalopy.

Peter yielded a short, dry smile. "First of all, I prefer to think of it as _my _car: let's call it an inheritance. Second, I'm not drunk. And...look, _nobody _is taking that car," he said. "I promise you. _Nobody. _ Did I tell you I bolted the hand-in-a-jar to the armrest? Wait, did I _tell _you about the hand-in-a-jar?"

Olivia was frustrated. Possibly because she was doing a very bad job being a responsible FBI handler, but more likely because she'd thought it might be fun to hang out with an outlaw. Like playing cowboys. Except he was sitting there like an off-brand Deputy Dawg and Olivia was the one thing she thought she _wouldn't_ be, which was bored. Which was funny, because what more could she want? A shoot-out?

"Peter, come on, it's one-thirty in the morning," she said, referencing the clock but not bothering to point out its lag.

"That's slow," he corrected anyway. "You know, usually, when people come out for drinks, they at least _have_ _a drink_."

Olivia had nothing to say. Peter eyed her.

"You can't get out of here fast enough, can you?" he asked.

Olivia was close to believing what he said about not being drunk; she was increasingly convinced that he wasn't. Just weird and frustrating, as usual. She put her head in her hands and pushed her hair back from her face. The men in the corner were playing darts on her body with their eyes; she could feel exactly where each glance landed.

"Hey," Peter said, and it was like he'd suddenly decided on a script to follow. He turned in his chair, his back to the bar, and stared her down. "You don't have to play nice with me, Dunham. If I'm not mistaken, the only reason you're here is because part of your job is to keep tabs on me_._" His voice was stronger, not too loud, but Olivia could feel the men listening. "If I don't go home to Walter...if I'm even a few minutes late to the office, it's your ass on the line to find me. Isn't that right, sweetheart."

Olivia wasn't sure how to respond. This wasn't Peter. Or, if it were Peter, it wasn't a shade she'd seen yet. Now she wanted to believe he was drunk, but couldn't. She couldn't think of a single thing to say.

And then Peter made a face. Not a ridiculous face or even a very obvious face, but a face she was not expecting. She thought she'd imagined it. But he kept looking at her and he raised his eyebrows like he was asking her a favor.

"Well that's just great," he kept on. He brought out his wallet and dropped two twenties next to her untouched shot. "Guess I'm not thirsty anymore, either." He picked his coat up off the back of his chair, and for the first time Olivia noticed the backpack on the floor by his feet. He took a few steps toward her and made sure to stand in her personal space. "Well?" he growled. "Let's have that ride."

Olivia refused to take a step back, but she did weave her head briefly to see around his shoulders to where the bag was still sitting, forgotten.

"You're not drunk. Deal's off. And you forgot something," she said. He studied her face.

"No I didn't," he said. But he didn't look around to see what it was he may or may not have forgotten, and that's how she knew the bag was his, and how she knew it was important, and how she knew it had to be part of the reason he'd needed her to be here.

"What's in..." she began, but his eyes narrowed so sharply and he leaned toward her so heavily that even she - a person who wasn't scared of anything - lost her voice. He held himself like that for a moment. For the first time since she'd met him, Olivia was reminded that Peter had been a Bad Man. Not just a cunning trickster or a charming outlaw, but someone who, for all that she had learned, remained mostly an unknown entity.

"Let's go," he said.

Olivia had long wondered, all through her years at the academy and the endless classes on conduct and integrity, how agents could ever allow themselves to become complicit in some cockeyed scheme with the very criminals they'd been sent to apprehend. Now she understood. The mystery bag, the men at the end of the bar, the necessity of her FBI identification: the circumstances coagulated into a single story.

She knew what she _should_ do, assuming that she was the same Agent Olivia Dunham from one month ago. And she knew what she was going to do now, since she no longer was. There was a bigger game to play: one that required the continued services of Peter Bishop.

So she cocked her head and nodded once.

"Fine," she said.

And then they were gone.

_February 14, 2011, 11:31pm_

A few beers in and she's trying to impress him. He knows she wouldn't ever call it that: she'd call it playing, or competing, or some other thing that it wasn't. Nevertheless she's doing her card trick again, the one he'd liked before, but Peter doesn't have the energy to be appreciative and it makes her seem like a dog offering its paw after all the treats are gone. It's taken enough out of him just to get her here to the bar: _their _bar, or at least it used to be, before the Other Side. They haven't been here together since she's come back.

"I know I said it was, but," he says, "technically, that's not counting cards."

Olivia looks up. She tilts her head. Peter looks at her skin in the soft bar light and still finds it almost unbelievable that she has no scars.

"I'm sorry, is this not impressive enough for you anymore?" she asks, her hand peeling back the corner of the next card. Which, she tells him, is the four of clubs. Peter looks down and purses his lips in a kind of patient smile. Olivia seems fine, and he has to keep reminding himself that she doesn't always seem fine: that she has spells of wariness and fear and of all things _shame,_ that he's been aching to get her alone with him again so that maybe she'll talk, and that she's been resistant and he doesn't know why.

"Look," he says, tugging at his coaster, letting his fingertip trip from its edge to the table, "it's just that there's a _science_ to card counting. Statistics and numbers..." Off her blank expression he manages a chagrined smile and shakes his head. "Yeah, I know."

"It's not that I don't care," she teases, but she's sinking fast under the weight of his mood. "It's just that I think you might be a little jealous."

Peter reaches for his beer, still smiling wanly. The label on the bottle is bright and busy, and it's an easy target for his eyes when he's trying to keep them off her.

"It'd be a shame to waste that natural talent. I'd bet you could pick up the real thing in an hour," he says, between swigs. It's a pale ale. He almost wishes he hadn't had those other two pale ales because he's starting to miss his sense of taste, but a nine-percent beer is a beautiful thing. The alcohol is having the unnerving effect of buoying the memories of her absence, making them rise up slowly to drown him.

"Bet I could," she answers, but she isn't asking him to teach her. Her beer is empty. One of these minutes he's going to get up and get her another one. Any minute now.

They both stare at their bottles in silence.

"How are you feeling?" Peter asks, then, and he knows it's a giveaway, a straight-up tell that he's thinking hard about it because he only gets one ask per week.

"Not great," she says, because she'd promised that when he _did_ ask, she'd answer. "Like I'm moving too fast." She pauses. "Things taste weird." She points at her empty beer. "Grape soda and marshmallows."

"Are you sleeping?"

"I've never been good at sleeping."

"Yeah. But are you sleeping?"

She looks up at him and she really doesn't look that tired, but she's good with concealer and it helps that nobody thinks of her as a person who wears makeup - except for Peter, because she can't hide much from him. He wonders if he smudged his fingertip under her eyes if he'd reveal a darker color there.

"I try," she says.

She isn't being terribly forthcoming. He wants more questions. He knows why she won't give them to him; he can understand that she's afraid he'll ask about the thing that happened - the thing _she did_ - before it all went to hell for a while. But he'd come to terms a month ago with the fact that they wouldn't just pick up where they left off. He gets that neither one of them is coming from the same place they used to be. He also can't reassure her that he won't press her about it without bringing it up in the first place.

He only just manages, on most days, not to feel offended by the restraints she puts on his concern.

He rearranges his legs fitfully.

"You're still talking to Walter about all this?" he asks. It bugs him that Walter never left her circle of trust.

"Yeah," she says. "Everything is fine. He'll tell you."

He doesn't want to ask Walter. He wants to ask _her_. He tells himself what he always tells himself, what he's been telling himself since her return. _Wait. _ _Just wait. _But beer and impatience get the best of him.

"Someday you're gonna trust me, right?" He says this with irritation but also with hope, an appeal for mercy.

"I trust you," she says automatically.

"No, see, you _say _that, but-"

"Peter, I _trust_ you." But there's something in what she's saying that she just can't get behind. She slouches. She can't look at him, or won't. "I honestly have no idea _why_ I trust you, but I have, right from the beginning." Peter isn't sure whether to respond to her faith or her questioning of it. He's debating in his head, and suddenly she laughs.

"What?" He has the feeling her laughter is at his expense. She covers her mouth with her hand.

"Do you remember," she says through a wide smile, "the time you called me up in the middle of the night and had me come out to Shanley's and supervise some mob deal you were making?" She laughs again. "You-" she can barely get it out "-you_ used_ me to make a _deal!_" Peter's face is mirroring hers: he's smiling, too, like this is a joke she's telling. It's weird how close to the surface this story is, how easily it's pouring out of her, like she's been telling it to herself.

"What?" he says.

"Oh my _god_, Peter," she says headily, "I was _so_ sure someone would find out. I was _so_ sure I was going to lose my job." She's still laughing but it's more and more obvious that it's not the good kind of laughing. "I mean, _Jesus,_" she exhales, brushing at her eyes, "if I could trust you after _that..._"

Peter's sitting up straight now. He reaches a hand out experimentally and tries to pin down one of hers. "Hey...wait a minute, okay?" She pauses mid-laugh and the way her face freezes looks sad even though her mouth is turned up. "I think..."

"What?" she says, and she looks hopeful in a way that might break his heart. His hand tightens on her hand but not because he means it to.

"I think there's been a misunderstanding," he says. "That... Okay." He puts his other hand on the table, nothing to hide. "It _was _a deal. Not the kind you have in your head, okay? It was a buyout."

She waits.

"You remember I told you I owed kind of a lot of money to some people?" he asks. She doesn't nod but he knows she remembers. "Well, those were the people. And they didn't want just money anymore, they wanted their piece of me, and I figured they were gonna get it if I couldn't figure out a really compelling reason for them to back off."

"So I was...what? Protection? Insurance?"

"Both?" he says tentatively. There was no way to know if this version was sounding better to her than her own. "I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been any good to you or Walter dead."

"Why didn't you just tell me? Or Broyles?" She asks this with an accusatory expression, an angry tone, and Peter can't help but come back on the offense.

"First, let me ask you a question: how much does an FBI consultant get paid? And why would an FBI consultant with a salary choose to live in a hotel room with his deranged father when he could easily afford his own place?" He stops to watch her, to let her think. "Look, you wanted to know what was in the bag? Money was in the bag, a whole lot of money. I _went_ to Broyles. The best he could do was a year's advance, and to just look the other way. Authority figures are too accountable, too enmeshed to get involved. He didn't want to know."

"But _I_ could have handled it. You could have told _me,_" she says.

"Yeah, I could have," he says. He tries to come up with the reason he hadn't, but there wasn't just one. They weren't, then, who they are, now. Not yet.

Her hand in his is warming up, slowly, but shows no other signs of life. She's upset with him for things that happened a long time ago, she's upset with him for all his prying questions, and she's upset with him because there are parts of him that, to her, are still the unknown entity. She's upset for reasons he hasn't yet guessed.

"For _three years_ you thought I sold you down the river for a payoff?" he says incredulously.

"What was I supposed to think?"

"I thought it was...I thought I'd made it obvious." Clearly, he hadn't. He regrets that now. But it was a long time ago and he doesn't know why it's on her mind. And not just this story but the others she's been bringing up: stories about his trip to Washington - his road trip, she calls it - and his early threats of desertion. Peter shakes his head and dislodges a thought so unsettling that he almost jumps. He pulls her hand further across the table. His other hand covers her wrist. "Why," he says, "why bring that up?"

Her eyes slide left like she might actually be trying to form the answer to that question, but she self-corrects. "It's just a funny story," she says instead.

He rejects her answer with a simple, pointed, "Why?" which she deliberately misinterprets.

"Because you scammed me. At least, I thought you did," she replies.

"And that's significant now, why?" Her eyes are getting smaller as he asks each question, like she's squinting into the wind.

"It's not, really."

"It is, though." He knew her well enough. She spoke so few words that none of them were accidents. "You think I did something. You think I let you down." He wonders if that sentiment is strong enough. He wonders if he should have used 'betrayed' instead. He's expecting by now to feel the pull of her arm on her hand, trying to get away, but it's not happening.

"Peter," she says.

"What was it that you think I did?"

"_Peter._"

"You think I slept with her."

Olivia draws her head back with a look of genuine surprise, like he'd guessed something she hadn't even thought of. There is a little hiccup of silence before she says, "No."

Now Peter is confused. There _is _something there - she's easy to read when he's doing the reading - but it's not that. It's something worse than that, something that she isn't keen to share, and it's not because she doesn't want to make _him_ look bad - he's sure she'd have no problem with that. Which leaves something that would make _her _look bad. Which can only be that one thing, the thing she never wants him to speak of. And that's too bad, because he's going to speak of it now. He holds her a little tighter.

"Don't run," he cautions. "But whatever...whatever you think about what we did in that apartment-"

"_NO_," she says, and she says it explosively loud. "Why does it always come back to that? What do you want me to say about it? I liked it? Or I didn't like it? Or I made it all up?"

"Did you?"

"_Of course not_," she hisses.

"Well, then, help me out, here," he says, equally impassioned, frustrated and sympathetic. "What's going on? What is this thing you keep talking about without talking about?"

Olivia hangs her head. She's so close.

"Peter-" she says, and he knows she _wants_ to go there.

"Just tell me."

Olivia struggles with herself and when she finally opens her mouth, the whisper is: "I'm so ashamed." Not what he thought it would be. Now that she's talking, he doesn't want to push too hard, but he can't help the begging look on his face. He doesn't dare rub his thumbs over her wrists like he wants to, or pull his chair closer to hers. He sits in silence.

"Peter. You don't...you can't imagine the things he said."

"Who?"

"Your father," she says. Peter ironically has to keep himself from saying _that man is not my father._ "He told me- he said it was you, that you helped him make the switch." She sees his eyebrows shoot up and she keeps talking to keep him from saying anything. "The way he did it...it was like you were outside, like you were just, just in his office or down the hall. He would get _phone calls _from you, Peter, while he was right in front of me. And I-" She can't stop Peter from half-standing, from leaning over the table, from putting his face much closer to hers than it had been any time in that last month.

"I didn't have _anything_ to do with what happened," he says vehemently. "I didn't sell you out back then, and I did _not_ sell you out to _them_." Olivia curls her fingers inside the cup of his hands. That'sit. His heart drops. She's staring at her bottle, _through_ her bottle, somewhere else.

"I know that," she whispers. "I _knew _that. But he kept going, and going, and going, and nobody came."

"We were trying," he says. She looks at him and there's something almost resentful about it.

"It just took you so long." Her voice is bizarrely reasonable, but her words are fragments and thoughts. "And before. You'd already left us." Peter hears _me_ instead of _us_, and knows his interpretation is more accurate."You were so angry with Walter, and you had all that time with your father. With your _mother_, Peter." She pauses. "And I couldn't believe you wouldn't have noticed she wasn't me."

There is a mutual drawing apart of hands.

"Of course I fucking noticed," he says. He's shocked and hurt and he's having a hard time staying calm. "You _know_ I noticed. Everyone _noticed_. But _you're_ how everyone got over there in the first place, and I'm not sure how you expected us to get back so fast without you." His chest is tight. He'd just about broken himself trying to get her back. "I mean-" he shakes his head in angry frustration "-you know _all_ of this, we've told you the whole story fifty times!"

"I know. I told you, I didn't believe him."

Peter makes fists with his hands and then releases, spreading his fingers on the table. "But a _little bit_, you did," he says.

"You don't understand what it was like," she says roughly. She looks worried.

"...But that's still not it, is it?" he asks, searching. "The thing is that, a little bit, you _still don't know for sure._" The look she gives him is all he needs.

"Peter," she says, like she's sure he's about to get up and go, "you don't understand." But Peter doesn't get up, and he doesn't leave. He sits. He thinks. He tries to let the sting of it pass through him.

Minutes die. A barback takes their bottles, which puts them both at a loss for places to look: the table is boring, the ceiling is too high and the walls are too close to the faces they want to avoid.

"'Livia," he says finally. It comes out of nowhere, not a whisper, but close. "You weren't you."

Her eyes shift on something behind him.

"I now consider myself kind of an expert on telling when you're not you," he says, but she doesn't smile and neither does he. He scuffs his chair a little closer to the table. "I also have experience being trapped. I know what it's like to have too much time to think. In the dark."

Her gaze alights upon him for tiny marks of time.

"I know that things that wouldn't have seemed reasonable before start to feel like the truth. You don't know what to believe. You start going over your memories, every little scene, trying to find the thing you missed that'll make everything make sense."

Olivia swallows heavily. She shifts in her chair.

"I know that doesn't all leave you when you get out," Peter says. "I know that doubt leaves ghosts. And it's not your fault, but you have to come back from that and see the way things really are. Before all this, you had a pretty good handle on what was going on. You weren't always confused about which world you were in or if everyone was who they looked like."

Olivia's heads sinks, her chin to her chest, and Peter knows the two faces flashing in her mind.

"I can't speak for everything, but you certainly weren't always confused about _me_," he says. He tilts his head, leans toward her, tries to get her to look up. "You were so sure of me that you risked your life to bring me-" he hesitates "-home." He knows that she can't reconcile what she did with the idea she has about how they work. He recognizes that she heard him say he didn't want to risk it with her and she came and kissed him anyway, and he's not sure how she's resolved that for herself.

She takes a deep breath. "It was a gambit."

"No," he says, "it wasn't. In a gambit, you have to lose something." He hopes she hears what he's saying.

She looks up again and her face is startlingly sad.

"Hey," he breathes.

"I'm sorry," she says.

"I know."

"Sometimes I feel like it's never going to get better."

Peter would ask what she means by 'it', but he figures he could probably substitute 'everything' and it would be accurate enough.

"It will," he says. "Just wait."

"I can't just _wait._" Her frustration rings true; her impatience is something he loves about her.

"Then try to see things the way they were," he says, "the way they still are." She nods, despondent. He smiles. "Start with me, if you don't mind."

She doesn't smile back, not exactly, but after a few quiet minutes she puts her hand back on the table. Peter looks at it, alone and palm-up, and this seems to remind him of something. He reaches behind himself, into the pocket of his overcoat, and pulls out a little postcard. He puts it into her hand.

"I got you a little something," he says. "It being a holiday and all." He wonders if she even knows it's Valentine's Day.

She turns it over. The back is blank save for the usual postcard boxes and rules, but the front is a photograph of a man with the night sky behind his head.

"It's Hugh Everett," Peter explains sheepishly, not that she'll know who that is.

Over the starfield, he's written something: _You're the best of __all__ worlds._ "And I would know," he says in a silly way: a part of the presentation. He doesn't say anything aboutbeing great _partners _or valuing the _partnership_, because if she takes it some other way, he's not inclined to stop her. But he knows they're not there yet, and this isn't meant to be a push.

She looks at his elegant letters, his steady penmanship hovering over the constellations.

"Wow, Peter," she says softly. For a moment he actually believes she's touched. Then she gets that embarrassed-for-you half-smile that she gets at least once every time they talk. "This is..." The smiles extends. "Truly," she says, "you _are_ your father's son." She doesn't have to specify which father.

"That bad?" he says.

She shakes her head. She lets the card slide to the table and her palm is open to him again. He puts his hand around it.

"Thank you," she says.

"You're welcome."

They sit there with their hands together until she starts feeling self-conscious, biting her lip and hooking her foot around the leg of her chair.

"Peter," she says, "I don't want to talk about this any more tonight."

He understands completely. He's not sure he wants to, either, even if she'd give him infinite questions.

"Can we still drink?" he asks. "I think I'd still like to do a little more of _that _tonight_._"

"Love to," she says in a hurry. "Think you can teach me to count cards before last call?"

"Sweetheart," he says, getting up from his chair, "that's gonna depend on you."


End file.
